Clifford Brown

Clifford Brown was the great hope of the jazz trumpet, and for a few years he was its brightest light. He had a full, gleaming tone, flawless technique, and a melodic imagination that poured out warm, perfectly shaped lines at any tempo. Inheriting the legacy of Fats Navarro, he polished it to a brilliance that influenced nearly every trumpeter who came after.

He stood apart in another way too. In an era when heroin tore through the jazz world, Brown didn’t use, didn’t drink much, was famously kind and clean-living, a devoted husband and family man. He was proof that you didn’t need to destroy yourself to play this deeply, a quiet rebuke to the romance of self-ruin.

His quintet with drummer Max Roach was one of the finest hard-bop bands of the 1950s, and the records they made together – along with his collaborations with Sarah Vaughan and others – are luminous, joyful, endlessly listenable. He was 25 and getting better by the month.

Then, in June 1956, he died in a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, along with the pianist Richie Powell and Powell’s wife. The loss stunned the jazz world. Benny Golson wrote “I Remember Clifford” in his memory, and the tune’s aching tenderness says everything about what was taken.